Outsider Environments Europe: Franco Tondo, Il giardino delle sculture scomparse / The garden with disappeared sculptures

May 16, 2025

Franco Tondo, Il giardino delle sculture scomparse / The garden with disappeared sculptures

this image and the next one as on Google Streetview

The image above, taken in March 2009, shows what a sculpture garden in Italy looked like as seen from the street.

The image below, taken somet ten years later, in April 2019, shows the same setting, but all sculptures have disappeared.

Franco Tondo's lost sculptures

The garden with disappeared sculptures, as the site could be called today, was located in the hamlet of Dragoni, part of the municipality of Lequile, a town of about 8,200 inhabitants in the province of Lecce (Apulia region) in the far southeast of Italy.

The terrain on which the sculptures were situated and where Franco Tondo's house also stood, lies along a public road and is separated from it by such a low fence that Tondo's creations could be seen (and photographed) from the road.

The terrain has now partly become a vegetable garden.

this image and the next four by Filippo Montinari as on Facebook

Virtually no biographical information is available about Franco Tondo.

His name and the year 1995 have been added to the basis of one of the sculptures. This information makes it clear that the sculptures were made halfway through the last decade of the previous century.

Because the house now has a different owner, it is also clear that Franco Tondo has since died, but how old he was at the time is unknown

Information about the nature of the sculptures that enriched this art environment is actually only available thanks to Filippo Montinari, who took photographs of them, which he published on Facebook (see documentation).

The sculptures that comprise the art environment are about five meters high and what they depict is partly clearly recognizable.

This concerns in particular the group comprising Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus, lying in the manger.

In that group there was also an angel, who held a star, while at the foot of the manger lay a lamb.

Reasoning from the scene with the birth of the baby Jesus, other sculptures can be interpreted as possibly the three Wise Men from the East and others perhaps as the shepherds who stayed in the fields in the vicinity of the stable where Jesus was born.

The sculpture garden also included a piece of land transformed into a large mosaic. This mosaic appears to depict a baptismal font, next to which are two figures, one of whom is making an offering.

A section of the mosaic could also depict a freak and some comets.